from msnbc
So what’s worse for the Obama White House -- that Republicans are aiming all their fire to defeat health-care reform, or that liberals are now up in arms over the idea that the president isn’t 100% behind a public/government insurance option?
Sen. Russell Feingold said that "without a public option, I don't see how we will bring real change to a system that has made good health care a privilege for those who can afford it.” Rep. Anthony Weiner, who made the expedient decision not to run against Mike Bloomberg for NYC mayor, is threatening that 100 House Democrats won’t support any health-care bill that doesn’t contain a public option.
And liberal pundits are upset, too. Jon Stewart, in fact, used a sledgehammer last night, mocking the White House for its inability to stay on message, like the Bush White House was able to do in the run-up to the Iraq war. Here’s a fun little exercise: Find one, ONE, Republican (or even a conservative Democrat) who is publicly praising the White House's backtrack in any of the clips this morning.
*** Poll day! Just how is the health-care debate playing -- after the coverage of the rowdy town halls and after Obama’s own three town halls last week? Well, NBC News has a new poll that answers this question and others, including what do Americans believe the health-care reform will do or not do. For the results, be sure to tune into MSNBC (and First Read) for a teaser result or two this afternoon. And then, beginning at 6:30 pm ET, be sure to watch NBC Nightly News or click onto MSNBC.com for the entire survey.
*** Grassley’s huge admission: Lost in yesterday’s intense focus about whether or not the Obama administration was backing away from a public/government option was a significant development in the health-care debate that COULD make it easier to pass legislation that would make most Democrats happy. That development: Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley admitting that he probably wouldn’t vote for any type of bill -- even if he got everything he wanted in it. “I am negotiating for Republicans, and if I can’t get something that gets more than four Republicans, I am not a very good representative of my party,” he told one of us on MSNBC yesterday morning. When pressed if he’d vote against a bill that he considered a good deal, he replied, “It isn't a good deal if I can’t sell my product to more Republicans.” So this begs the question: Why is the White House still negotiating with him, unless Grassley truly believes he can whip up more GOP support than McConnell and Kyl.
*** “Democrats are going to have to do it themselves”: If Grassley’s comments last week on end-of-life counseling weren’t the final nails in the coffin on being able to draft a bipartisan bill, then yesterday’s admission yesterday definitely was. As Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager of the liberal-leaning Health Care for America Now, puts it: Grassley acknowledged that he was sitting at the negotiating table, but not negotiating in good faith. “If they walk away,” he said, “Democrats are going to have to do it themselves.” And doing it themselves means that the negotiations will occur to win over centrist Democrats (like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Kent Conrad) and not Republicans (like Grassley and Enzi). On the other hand, Grassley’s admission yesterday may further upset some Democrats who believe the president has been too quick to cut a deal, like dangling the omission of a public option as a compromise.
*** The public option litmus test: Honest question: How did the debate over health turn into a debate over the public option -- a term that political reporters who covered the ’08 presidential primaries and general election rarely ever heard from the candidates? According to Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker, who is a public-option proponent, progressives and reform advocates have seen it over the past few years as a mechanism to ensure accountability from a system centered on private insurance, and Obama, Clinton, and Edwards all included it in their health-care plans. But what also elevated the issue, Hacker says, was the opposition from the right, which then only stiffened the resolve from liberals. Kirsch raises a third reason: The back-and-forth over the public option is much easier for the media to understand than the debate over other health policy minutiae.
*** Who else knew Baucus once supported the public option? As we were researching the genesis of the public option in the current debate over health-care reform, we Lexis-Nexis-ed the term “public option” after the presidential contest. Guess who was the first person whose name came up associated with the term? None other than Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, who introduced a white paper after the election calling FOR a health-care framework WITH a public option. Per MarketWatch on November 12: “Max Baucus of Montana, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, released an 89-page ‘Call to Action’ that he said represents his vision for reform. The plan would: Create a new health insurance exchange that would guarantee coverage for individuals and small businesses. They could compare prices between private health plans and a new public option similar to Medicare and use a standardized form to enroll in coverage. Some individuals and small businesses would be eligible for subsidies to offset the cost.” Just askin’, but when was the last time Baucus praised the public option idea?
"Liberal" Backlass my butt!
Why is this being framed as a liberal-conservative clash? The bottom line is that all of us of whatever persuasion are going to pay dearly for the stupidity of the right wing fear mongers, whose real agenda is to break the President.
And once again, the insurance companies are the proverbial 500 pound gorilla who can sit whereever he wants in the halls of Washington.
And it appears that stupidly deluded Medicare recipients are howling in outrage against government run health care. Catch a clue Grannie! You are being manipulated by right wing talk radio, who are probably being paid off by the insurance companies.
In fact, I read that this phony grassroots BS is working so well, the Petroleum Institute is formulating their own campaign and gathering oil industry workers to pack meetings with grass roots "outrage" over the climate bill.
It's just another nauseating example of how our representative democracy is being warped, twisted and ruined by huge corporations with loads of bribe money.
Here is an interesting essay regarding what we middle class folks can expect when the politicians and phony grassroots morons screw it up for the rest of us.:::::::::::
Uwe Reinhardt
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Uwe Reinhardt is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians.
Uwe Reinhardt says health costs are rising at unsustainable pace, gobbling up middle-class incomes.
(CNN) -- Watching the angry outbursts at town hall meetings on health reform and the continuing public ambivalence about current efforts to reform our health system almost makes me wish that the reform effort fails.
Perhaps Americans need to be taught a basic lesson on the economics of employment-based health insurance before they will feel as smugly secure with it as they do now and before they will stop nitpicking health-reform efforts to death over this or that detail.
And America's currently insured middle class will be increasingly desperate if health reform fails. Millions more such families will see their take-home pay shrink. Millions will lose their employment-based insurance, especially in medium and small-sized firms. And millions will find themselves inexorably priced out of health care as we know it.
Milliman Inc., an employee benefits consulting firm, publishes annually its Milliman Medical Index on the total health spending by or for a typical American family of four with private health insurance. The index totals the family's out-of-pocket spending for health care plus the contribution employers and employees make to that family's job-related health insurance coverage.
The Milliman Medical Index stood at $8,414 in 2001. It had risen to $16,700 by 2009. It is likely to rise to $18,000 by next year. That is more than a doubling of costs in the span of a decade!
Since 2005, the index has grown at an average annual compound rate of 8.4 percent. Suppose we make it 8 percent for the coming decade. Then today's $16,700 will have grown to slightly over $36,000 by 2019.
Economists are convinced that this $36,000 would come virtually all out of the financial hides of employees, even if the employer pretended to be paying, say, 80 percent of the employment-based health insurance premiums. In the succinct words of the late United Automobile Worker Union leader Douglas Fraser:
"Before you start weeping for the auto companies and all they pay for medical insurance, let me tell you how the system works. All company bargainers worth their salt keep their eye on the total labor unit cost, and when they pay an admittedly horrendous amount for health care, that's money that can't be spent for higher [cash] wages or higher pensions or other fringe benefits. So we directly, the union and its members, feel the costs of the health care system." ("A National Health Policy Debate," Dartmouth Medical School Alumni Magazine, Summer 1989: 30)
Unfortunately, very few rank-and-file workers appreciate this fact. Aside from their still modest out-of-pocket payments and contributions to employment-based insurance premiums, most employees seem sincerely to believe that the bulk of their family's health care is basically paid for by "the company," which is why so few members of the middle class have ever been much interested in controlling health spending in this country.
The price for that indifference will be high. If efforts at better cost containment fail once again, and health care costs rise to $36,000 on average for a typical American family of four under age 65 -- as almost surely it would -- that $36,000 will be borne entirely by the family. That family's disposable income would be much higher if the growth of future health spending was better controlled. And, as noted, many smaller firms will stop altogether providing job-based health insurance.
It would be a major problem for families with an income of less than $100,000 a year. In 2007, only about 25 percent of American families had a money income of $100,000 or more. Close to 60 percent had family incomes of less than $75,000.
Here it must be remembered that the wages and salaries of the solid American middle class have been relatively stagnant in recent years and are likely to remain so for the next decade. Unemployment is not likely to fall significantly soon, regardless of what stock prices do on Wall Street. Indeed, often stock prices rise as firms lay off workers to drive up profits through leaner payrolls.
This prospect -- relatively stagnant family incomes combined with family health-care costs that double every decade -- is what America's middle class should contemplate as it thinks about the imperative of health reform.
It is a pity that this central issue seems to have been shoved aside by mendacious distortions from Sarah Palin, Betsy McCaughey, Rush Limbaugh and other extremist commentators seeking to frighten Americans with their prattle about "death panels" and "pulling plugs on granny" that no bill before Congress even remotely envisions.